This is crazy. Back in the day, the 1990’s, SGI were the hardware kings of The Valley.

To give you an idea of how little money $25,000,000 is, according to IMDB, Jim Carrey was paid that much to do Bruce Almighty (2003).

What this means is that Rackable could have gotten Jim Carrey to do standup comedy at their Holiday Party, or went ahead and purchase SGI. They went ahead with SGI.

$25M for SGI is like finding out that the really good looking girl you wanted to go to the prom with in high school. The one who was on the cheerleading squad, but she was cool because she knew who David Lynch was and listened to Nirvana. Well, it’s like finding out that she’s now living in a van down by the river.

It’s jarring because it illustrates just how quickly fortunes in this business can change. There’s a case study to be made (if someone hasn’t already written this up) about how Open Source software combined with the shattering of Moore’s Law brought about a platform that moved past SGI’s proprietary/high-priced solution at such shocking speed that they were too slow to react and their market share collapsed beneath them in a matter of quarters (for example: I seem to recall HP making some significant competitive winbacks at large digital animation studios with Linux in the early 2000’s).

And as they struggled to stay afloat for the past few years, what is left…speaking of which, what is left?

Well, whatever is left is now going to Rackable in their van down by the river.